Son of Bane
by Dystopiac
Summary: Mikhail never knew his father. But that doesn't mean he can't avenge his death.
1. Prologue

_Prologue_

_July 1998.  
_

There was nothing particularly special about Serafina Kuznetsova.

She wasn't smart. She wasn't funny. She couldn't sing or dance or paint. She wasn't even physically fit; preferring to simply spit or bite when violence occurred, and besides, with a gun she didn't even need to raise her fists when a bullet would put someone in their place much more effectively and painfully than even the best of punches.

Serafina was also aware that she wasn't much of a looker, either. She was average height and build and dressed in plain black shirts and jeans and boots and an old Soviet military jacket that she acquired from a former soldier who couldn't pay his debts. In keeping with her efforts to remain as un-feminine as possible, she regularly shaved her hair short to the scalp, reasoning that she was more practical than pretty anyway. Besides, in her line of work, pretty could all too easily work against you.

Serafina was a thief, an aggressive thug and drug dealer.

And, just seven months into her twenty year sentence for possessing and distributing illegal drugs, Serafina Kuznetsova was going to be a mother.


	2. The Birthday Card

**The Birthday Card.**

_July 2014._

It was a Saturday.

Today was also Mikhail's sixteenth birthday.

And, as one of six others currently fostered under the same roof, he was not used to receiving much attention. Mikhail kept himself to himself, a quiet boy, who would potter around the small house or do his homework, sometimes helping one of his younger foster brothers or sisters if they asked nicely enough. Ira, the woman who he had called Mama for as long as he could remember, was always busy, either dealing with the large never ending load of washing that resulted from having six children under one roof, banging around in the kitchen or sat down on the old floral patterned sofa, watching the television with the girls.

When he was younger, he loved nothing more than to join her, sitting cross legged at her feet, only semi paying attention to the old television which all too often was showing dramas from America and England. If Mama was in the kitchen preparing dinner and Papa was at home, he would instead see the news, talking about all sorts of serious events going on in countries he'd never even heard of.

Nowadays, Mikhail would watch the news with Papa, read the newspapers or go online for foreign events.

Mikhail was very interested in current events, and his history teacher would often advise him to consider a career in politics or journalism. Something educated and respectable, and Mama and Papa agreed.

"Never underestimate the value of education, my boy, and you will go far," Papa would tell him.

So it was that Mikhail went to school, studied hard and even harder at night, assisted around the house and would meet with friends at the weekend. He was a good, hard working teenage boy.

And nothing was out of the ordinary.

There was a shout from downstairs, and Mikhail took a deep breath, brought to attention from staring at his reflection in the mirror. He was very easily described as a handsome boy. A pair of dark brown eyes stared as he ran his fingers over his full lips, before rubbing his soft nose and tracing his right cheekbone, finally stopping at his temple to scratch at dark brown hair.

There was not a spot or blemish in sight, much to the annoyance of his friends and to the delight of the girls who would whisper and giggle when he looked over at them in class.

"Mikhail!"

Another shout from downstairs. He took one last look in the mirror before padding downstairs in his socks, the carpet on the stairs worn out and in need of replacement.

Loud cheers and clapping hands greeted him when he walked into the small dining room, and Mikhail put on a warm smile.

"Happy birthday, Misha!" cried his foster sister, Katja, as she hugged him tight, her brunette locks tickling his cheek. She smelt of strawberries and shampoo, and Mikhail never stopped finding it comforting, even now in adolescence when he was more aware of the opposite sex than ever.

"Oh, my boy, you're becoming so big!" Ira embraced him, tearful at the thought of the young boy who she had raised and loved growing into a responsible adult. "Where have the years gone?"

"Stop it, Mama," Mikhail took her hand and squeezed it tight.

These kinds of displays always made him feel awkward. Although he loved the elderly woman and appreciated everything she had done for him, most of all taking him in when he was just a few months old, he still found her constant wave of emotions to be challenging to deal with. She would weep with joy when he brought home the best grades in the school, insist he had a hot cup of tea when studying by himself, and would serve him extra portions at dinner after being advised by the school fitness coach that, as Mikhail was easily five or six inches taller than other boys his age, he should be gaining weight so he wouldn't resemble a string bean so much.

He took his turn to hug his other, much young, sister Svetlana, and his younger brothers Roman and Timofey and to marvel at the cards they had given him, each one with their names written in crayon, the writing nervous and unsure. Aleksei, his older brother by one year, was seated at the table and patted Mikhail on the back as he sat down next to him.

Papa was at work at the university and would most likely greet Mikhail when he got home later.

It was shaping up to be another ordinary birthday.

The attention Mikhail was currently receiving would have calmed down the next day, and by Monday things would be back to normal.

Mikhail found himself going through the motions of eating breakfast, acting grateful for the new shirts and socks Mama had bought him, and he _was_ grateful, declining Mama's offer to accompany him and his younger brothers and sisters to do the weekly shop, hugging Katja once more as she left to meet her boyfriend, putting his dishes in the sink to be washed and returning to his room and logging on to his computer.

The house was quiet once everyone had left and Aleksei was still downstairs, most likely watching the television and the only sounds to Mikhail's ears were the gentle hum of the computer and the sound of his fingertips tapping on the keyboard as he chatted to friends on Facebook and messed around on the internet to pass the time.

He had lost track of time within minutes, so the sound of the post arriving brought his attention away from the articles he was reading online and back to the empty house.

He went downstairs.

Aleksei was not in the living room watching television anymore so he must have gone out. He was alone. Just as he liked it.

There were several letters lying on the mat.

He flicked through junk, bills addressed to Mama and Papa, a handwritten letter addressed to Aleksei, most probably from his social worker, and stopped when he came to a letter addressed to him.

Mikhail looked at it. It was a small, white envelope and the address was handwritten in an untidy scrawl and in the Roman alphabet, so it definitely wasn't from school, his social workers or anyone else he could think of.

The stamps indicated that the letter had arrived from the United States of America.

Now Mikhail was very curious, wondering who in America would be sending a letter to him.

He ripped open the envelope, careful not to rip through the stamps or the address and found it was a birthday card with a big "16" in cartoon figures and a picture of a cake with candles burning on top of it. He frowned and opened the card out.

A news article which had been cut out of a paper fell onto the floor and Mikhail picked it up, noting that it was in English and held in it his hand as he focused on the card.

There was no 'To Mikhail' or 'Happy Birthday' scrawled inside. There was no name signed.

Instead, at the bottom of the card, in the same untidy hand, were six words, this time written in Russian.

Mikhail's heart began to beat hard in his chest as he read the six words carefully, wondering if it was some sort of joke. He shut the card, placed it back in the envelope and ran upstairs to his bedroom, the whole time his heart was racing, his mind was spinning and his face was set into a confused frown.

The words kept repeating themselves over and over inside his head as he paced around his room, card still in hand, the article now scrunched up in the same hand, forgotten.

_You are the son of Bane._

It had to be a joke.

It had to be.


	3. Second Contact

**Second Contact.**

****...

Mikhail hated jokes. He hated pranks. It was foolish behaviour when there were more important things to be doing. And most of all he hated being on the receiving end of jokes, pranks or simple stupidity.

It had been three days since he had received that card, and he hadn't moved it from where it lay in his computer desk drawer, still in its envelope. The article lay untouched along with it.

And yet the more Mikhail thought about it, the less certain he was that it was a joke.

He knew of Bane, of course. He'd have to be an idiot not to, the events of last year still fresh on people's minds, unable to heal, unwilling to be forgotten. Mikhail had to admire the people of Gotham, USA. Their spirit remained undefeated, even in the face of a terrorist such as Bane.

Mikhail scoffed. A terrorist taking over a whole city. What on earth did Bane possibly hope to achieve? And then to be killed by some sort of gun shot in the torso, Mikhail wondered how it was that Bane managed to hold control over Gotham for so long.

And for him, a regular, sensible teenage boy in central Russia to be the supposed son of a man . . . it was ludicrous.

Wasn't it?

There were still doubts. No matter how hard it was for Mikhail to ignore them, they still chipped away at the back of his mind.

He didn't know anyone in America, nor, to the best of his knowledge, did any of his friends. And there was little chance of this being a case of mistaken identity, as his name and address was clearly written on the envelope, addressed to him, Mikhail Kuznetsov, and it was a sixteenth birthday card that arrived on his sixteenth birthday. Mikhail was sure that someone must have planned this, for it to arrive on the exact day from the US with such a message inside was very suspicious.

He wanted to stop thinking about it. He wanted to forget the whole thing. He couldn't. He just couldn't make sense of the whole situation.

Why him?

...

...

...

...

At school, Mikhail kept a constant eye on those around him, especially his classmates, looking for any odd behaviour, the slightest sign that they were the mastermind behind those six little words.

There was nothing. Everyone went about their business as usual, and as Mikhail sat through his classes, his mind racing, that _stupid_ card going over and over in his head – and who knew it would have such an effect on him – he would look around and see all the smiling faces, hear all the laughter and think to himself how was it that life could go on when he was feeling more cornered by the minute.

Almost as if he was being watched.

Mikhail never knew his father, that much was true. He could have passed him in the street and never even known. And he didn't know much about his birth mother, either. What little he could remember of her were hazy childhood memories of visiting an unhappy woman in a prison, bloated from the diet she was fed and swamped by the hideous regulatory inmate uniform she wore.

She was never his true mother. Ira was his mother.

Mikhail could remember kicking up a fuss every birthday and mother's day when Ira took him to visit her, the woman who gave birth to him and nothing more, and he would scream and cry for the whole of the five hour train journey and she would never look too pleased to see him either. A small smile that didn't reach her eyes followed by an hour of formal small talk and awkward silences.

Mikhail hadn't seen her for ten years. It had simply been too troublesome for him, despite the rarity of the visits, so Ira had made the smart decision to cease the visits and it wasn't like _she_ put up much of a fight.

But his father. Now that was different.

There was a time when Mikhail was obsessed with finding his father. As an unspoken rule, parentage was never spoken of in the household, but that didn't stop Mikhail from scanning every man's face for even the slightest resemblance to his own, reasoning that he would look more like his father as he definitely held none of his birth mother's features. The slightest hint of brown hair, a strong jaw or even above average height would give him butterflies and he spent many nights wondering what his father did look like.

He wondered what the man was like, and how it was he became involved with his birth mother. He couldn't imagine _her_ ever loving someone or being loved, holding hands or smiling with genuine emotion etched into her face. Maybe they didn't know each other very well, or maybe it was a one or two night sort of thing. He just didn't know.

He needed to know. Now more than ever.

But in a world of six billion people, the chances of a thirteen year old boy stumbling upon his father in the streets or on the tram were very rare, if not nonexistent. So, his father became one of the great mysteries in his life and he tried not to think of it again.

And he hadn't thought of it again until that card arrived. Now he had questions and longed for answers, to put this whole mess straight.

He might, just might, have to visit his birth mother in prison. If she was still alive, that is. Truth was, Mikhail didn't even know. He had never cared before.

...

...

...

...

The post was lying on the mat again as he returned home. He picked it up and looked through it all. His heartbeat picked up slightly as he found himself wanting another message from his unknown tormentor, but at the same time dreading another attempt of contact.

He was just about to take the post through to the kitchen table and leave it there when he noticed it.

A white envelope.

Mikhail felt as though a sledge hammer had hit him through the chest. He felt his stomach lurch, his hands go sweaty and a pale flush spread across his face and neck.

The writing on the envelope was exactly the same as the writing on the birthday card.

This time, the envelope came from Egypt. Whoever was behind the first message had moved closer to him by the time they had sent this one. Mikhail was right. He was being cornered.

And they were going to find him and watch him.

He ripped open the envelope, not caring about tearing through the address and postage stamps. This was no longer a school prank. This was bigger.

Mikhail pulled out a small piece of paper, folded in two. He opened it up and felt himself go breathless.

_Rise, son of Bane, Rise. _

Only, this time, there was not just a scribbled message. There was a phone number, too.

...


End file.
